Parabola

Answered this for myself - yes the two effects roll to hit independently. So that raises the question do they both share the same 0.8 acc modifier? In terms of enhancements it looks like the damage cone is only affected by taoe sets and the fault part by stun, kb and taunt sets. I assume that the damage cone is prevented from being affected by taunt sets to stop the power double dipping on perfect zinger procs? I do wonder if this power isn't a little too complicated? Procs like a champion though.

I'm not sure I understand the geometry of the new fault. The patch notes suggest that the damage cone only extends between the caster and the target, which would make it have variable length? No other cone effect in the game works like this to my knowledge? How does it react to range enhancement and +range global bonuses? Also just to confirm, it is affected by the tanker arc buff right? If it is a variable length cone between caster and target and you have a separate radial fault effect around the target you are then torn when targeting. For maximum damage coverage you would want to target a critter at the back of the pack but you are then wasting fault radius extending beyond the pack. For maximum control coverage you would target a critter in the middle of the pack but then the damage cone would be shortened. I've had a quick play with it and it seems to work ok but it's very hard to tell on screen exactly what is going on! Another thought; if a critter is in both areas of effect is the power making two separate hit rolls against them for the damage and control effects?

Anything/dark melee. Dark melee on tanks is my favourite thing in coh right now and I'm starting to run out of armour sets to run it with. Claws is great on tanks too, and rad melee is interesting. Also looking forward to the stone melee changes to run a fire/stone. I'm planning a kind of 'anti-tank' that takes, slots and intends to use rise of the phoenix...

Speaking as someone who nearly always levels the old fashioned way I really value the starting boost the amplifiers give you. SO's at early levels smooth things out quite a bit but I'd be very sad to see the amps go (there is no way I'm paying full price for them).

I've long thought that the tone of far too much of the posting on these forums has left a lot to be desired. As a community we often pat ourselves on the back for our positive virtues but I see far too much evidence to the contrary. I've been taking a break from the game and these forums and that has been partly down to feeling less of a fuzzy sense of community here. I completely agree with the op, the dogpiling needs to stop. In addition I would love to see the back of /jranger and all similar shorthand for 'your idea sucks and it is beneath me to explain why'. It was banned on the original forums and it should be banned here. If someone posts a bad idea then either have the courtesy to properly explain why or just don't respond at all. The thread will sink without trace on its own. During my break I've been lurking in a couple of other forums (to do with ttrpgs), which seem to be moderated to a higher standard of community behaviour than this one and the difference is noticeable. There is far less antagonism and an acceptance that different people hold different points of view and that's ok. Whether it is prevented by an automated system or active moderation I don't see any of the snide shorthand posting and they are much better for its absence.

It's not just that it's riddled with crime - it's also chock full of superheroes who routinely ignore that crime to go and do something more interesting. Being the victim of a never ending mugging must be made all the more galling by watching hero after hero fly past. If the citizens knew that half the heroes spend all their time playing a glorified training virtual reality mission in the AE buildings and most of the rest are obsessed with travelling back in time to do some roman thing while the city burns in the here and now there would be rioting in the streets. Sorry, more rioting in the streets.

Yeah I've suggested this same thing before and for exactly the same reasons you have. It's such a shame that the self rez powers don't get more use. The debt itself is largely irrelevant either way but they still carry a stigma of 'planning to fail'. And of course there is the issue of the defeat counter and master runs etc.

Yeah, fair point. I guess I am saying that I feel the intent behind ppm was sound but that the reality isn't where we want to be. Trying to take the focus away from recharge in the build meta might be impossible now though. The game is built around recharging and using powers, the faster they recharge the more often the good ones can be used. People would still build for massive recharge with or without ppm. It's only really the way ppm reacts differently to slotted vs global recharge that sends it in an odd direction compared to how everything else works. The way I see it ppm allows procs to function at or above a 'worth using' threshold in a much greater variety of powers than the old system and that is a good thing. Not saying it's a great system, just that I think it achieved that part of what I perceive to have been its aim. Yes indeed. Something like this. If it could also take a pass at making pseudopet powers deliver consistent proc performance that would be great.

Yeah glue arrow operates like a 'rain' type power which are generally bad for procs. It's an argument for trying to make the system more easily understandable and even in its effects across all powers certainly. Bear in mind ppm was an attempt to achieve the second part of that even if it was hugely at the expense of the first. The original system overwhelmingly favoured quick recharging, quick activating 'buzzsaw' powers. Ppm made more types of powers worth proccing so it succeeded on that front, but of course in practice it has turned out to be a gameable system and still quite uneven in which powers work well with procs, while being very opaque for a newcomer trying to understand how best to use them. I wouldn't have said binning ppm is the answer if that meant going back to the flat 20% system. That system was too limited even if was easy to understand. I think we need some changes on a power by power level to even out performance and possibly a wider adjustment to ppm if doing it at the power level doesn't get us where we'd like to be. The theory behind ppm is sound enough to keep working with imo but how to make it easier for people to understand is certainly an issue.

Weigh heigh and up she rises?

It would also get around the problem of other people not turning off stealth auras or casting invisibility on you.

Don't worry we all had to start somewhere! This game manages to be both simple and complicated at the same time with a lot of that complexity hidden from plain sight (like how best to use procs). Bear in mind that there is no 'one right way' to either build or play characters. Experimentation is always the best way to learn what works for you. It is generally accepted that freeze ray is the superior power to it's bitter cousin but you can happily take both and try them out for yourself. Until I read the reply by @Chelsea Rorec above I'd never noticed freeze ray has less range. It isn't going to be enough to get me to change any of my builds (the dpa gap is huge) but it's interesting to know.

On a blaster it does a lot of base damage and blasters tend to need to slot sets for the bonuses. Ideally you would eventually want to put the unbreakable constraint proc in it so 5 of something else and that proc is what I usually end up with. 5 apocalypse including the proc + the unbreakable constraint one would work very nicely.

Freeze ray every day of the week and twice on Sundays. The important metric is dpa (damage per activation) and freeze ray is streets ahead of bitter freeze ray.

Where Guassian's really shines is on positional defence melee builds; SR, Nin and Shield. Each of these is typically shooting for softcaps in all three vectors and that 6 slot bonus is a very efficient use of slots. A typical 6 slot positional defence bonus will be 3.75% working out at 0.75% defence per added slot (5 on top of the base slot), but if you are using all three vectors Guassian's is giving you 7.5% defence at 1.5% per slot. When I'm building a SR, Nin or Shield the first thing I do is stick Guassian's in the build up power.

You're not slotting the full guassians set for the recharge though 🙂

With a full guassians set slotted at lv50 you have 73.78% recharge. This loses you something like 1.8% from the chance for the proc to fire in a 90 sec base recharge build up type power ... It really isn't worth worrying about.

My take on this subject is that the ceiling of difficulty for regular play (non challenge conditions) is too low for the level of power available from the IO and Incarnate systems. This isn't a problem for solo play but I feel that the teaming game at high levels suffers as a result of this. There is a teaming dynamic that exists at lower levels which I consider to be the core gameplay experience of CoH and this evaporates when a team has several members who can happily solo at the settings the team is running. This is quite similar to an idea I posted a while back for enemy buffs that scale with level and team size to give more of a challenge to high level teams. I really like the sound of this! In reference to the comment at the end I would definitely consider retro fitting this to existing content (after seeing how it performs in the wild of course). We have a ton of content in this game and anything added to that is always going to only be a small percentage of the whole. New content clearly takes a long time to develop so it seems sensible and efficient to consider changes that can spice up what we have.

Well I've already demonstrated my 'happy to watch the world burn' credentials in this thread so why not! In all seriousness though I would totally get behind the limits on inspirations and particularly removing level shifts. In my anything but humble opinion level shifts were one of the worst thought out design decisions made by the original devs (alongside several other bad design decisions in the incarnate system). In a game with a fixed ceiling of enemy difficulty artificially lowering that ceiling while simultaneously adding powerful new abilities to characters was not a good idea. Apart from anything it just doesn't make me feel more super, just that all my enemies have suddenly had a hand tied behind their backs. I'm not sure ED on procs is the answer for proc balance though. For a start it wouldn't deal with those single procs like gaussian's that some regard as problematic and it also wouldn't address the disparities between what different powers and AT's get from procs. I think for this issue a more targetted case by case approach is probably needed.

I'm not sure why a name change would affect anything here? But the bigger issue is that the damage that confused critters do isn't counted against you or your team, this is a misconception. The only limitation on your ability to gain xp and drops is time, there are an infinite number of enemies. Therefore anything that helps chew through mobs quicker is a benefit, even if each mob is worth slighly less xp. As I said before we gain far more in kill rate than we lose from mobs damaging each other by using confuse powers. This has been proven but the perception that confuses are in some way detrimental seems hard to shift.

If a confused enemy defeats another without any other damage being dealt you get no xp for the kill. But if you do even a sliver of damage you (or the team) get rewards. My understanding is that the distribution is rather generous so if you do 10% damage you get a lot more than 10% rewards. And the confused enemies are upping the kill speed by harming each other. Way back on live clever people did all the maths and proved confuse powers are a net gain to xp and drops.

Just a note on recovery slotting. Blaster sustains have twice the base recovery that stamina has. A 50+5 end mod io in a sustain is worth way more than any proc you can put in any power for recovery. I haven't played a blaster yet that has needed more end slotting than two 50+5's in the sustain and health at the base slot with the panacea proc and stamina at the base slot with either a performance shifter proc or another 50+5 end mod (they work out about the same). So you can free up a couple of slots here for other things, if you have nothing else to do with them you could slot heals into the sustain as well to beef up the absorb.

All the above info is solid. It's also worth mentioning that while there is a lot of overlap in the debuffs being applied by the various sets, they often go about applying those debuffs differently. Rad for example delivers its debuffs in two toggles and a click. The toggles have longish cast times and hefty endurance costs but once applied leave you free to do other things, but only if you don't get mezzed. A set like cold is all clicks, this has the advantage that they don't drop if you get mezzed but recasting eats into your time. Poison has a decent chunk of its debuff in a self cast toggle, this is potentially up all the time without having to even choose a target but again mez can drop it. So there are things to consider about how each set plays and how that works for you beyond the raw debuff types. Best advice is to play a few and get a feel for what you like.

If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. - Terry Pratchett

While this one is likely highly unpopular, it has some merit. It would be the best way to control power creep. It would eliminate the need for complicated ppm changes. Its very simple to both use and convey to players. I would personally hate this change but it would almost be worth it to see the absolute meltdown it would cause. No, in fact it would totally be worth it. Where do I sign?!